Anand Amaladass S. J.
Margherita Trento, Writing Tamil Catholicism, Literature, Persuasion and Devotion in the Eighteenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Pages: xiv, 369 pp. ISBN: 978–90–04–51161–3. List price: EUR €99.00 / USD $115.00.
This book is a rare type of research on Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (Vīramāmunivar) in the 18th century Tamilnadu (1680–1747). What is unique about this publication is the documentary evidence from several languages to support her insightful interpretation of Beschi’s epic poem, Tempavani.
The book is divided into three parts, each of them comprised of two chapters. Part One, “Spiritual Institutions,” explores the context of the emergence of Tamil Catholic literature, institutionalizing the “spiritual retreats for the catechists” in the village of Āvūr. This analysis is partially organized around the biography of Carlo Michele Bertoldi, who wrote the first adaptation of Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises into Tamil, known as Ñāṉamuyaṟci.
Part Two deals with the school for catechists instituted by Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi in the village of Ēlākkuṟicci in 1730. Significant is the textbook Beschi produced for his school, the grammar Toṉṉūlviḷakkam, to train catechists as a cultural élite, for the mission vis-à-vis political powers in the region.
Part Three of the book focuses on Beschi’s epic poem Tēmpāvaṇi, the masterpiece of eighteenth-century Tamil Christian literature. In a way, the whole book is presented as a micro-history of the birth and early life of this text.
Any historian would be impressed by the rigorous historiographical reconstruction, acute philological analysis and sympathetic ethnographical description she has been able to combine. The author claims that her method is a “reflection on the relationship between history and ethnography that keeps shaping my historical practice”. (p. 39)
This book focuses mainly on Constantine Joseph Beschi who is an acclaimed poet in the Tamil literature from the historical context in which he lived in the first half of the 18th century Tamilnadu. Muthuswamy Pillai wrote the first biogrpahy of Beschi after doing extensive field work speaking with people who had heard about Beschi in Elakkuricchi. But the Jesuit biographers like Leon Besse and Rajamanickam dismiss it as a work of imagination with exaggerated legends. For instance, Beschi’s relation with Chanda Sahib was not given any credit, but Margherita cites several sources to give credence to Muthusamy Pillai’s version, and to show that their friendship and separation are intertwined with their destiny.
Another striking feature which Margherita discloses is the way she anayses the epic Tempavani and identifies the constructed conversations of Beschi, where the difficutlies faced by the missionaries then are cleverly couched in the dialogue with the old woman who refuses Joseph’s arguments in favour of the Christian message. Here she cites a parallel text, Tasso’s poem Jerusalem Delivered, where the poet presents the internal feuds and tussels amomg the Christian princes during the crusade as the tricks of the devils to divert their attention.
The book is not merely an account of two great jesuit missionaries — Bertoldi and Beschi — but it is a history of Jesuit mission in the 18th century. The way she cites several letters and documents in Tamil, Italian, German, French, Latin, Portuguese, and English to support her interpretation is the result of her intensive search in various archives. Most of these materials appear in the footnotes, which tell a story parallel but integral to the main body of the book.
Taking the hint from a letter referring to Beschi as ‘father of flowers’ she builds her argument how Tirukkāvalūr has become a ‘cultural translation’, replica of Loretto in Italy, a place of pilgrimage being relocated here which Beschi’s poem Kalampakam celebrates.
It is significant how the Ekakkuricchi school of grammar initiated by Beschi to train the catechists was modelled on Saiva ādīnam played crucial role in the mission of the Jesuits even after the Jesuits were suppressed by the Church offically in 1773. She even remarks that the Jesuit mission method failed, but Beschi’s writings sustained the faith of the Christians in the absence of the missionaries which took them by surprise when they returned in 1834 after the restoration of the Society of Jesus. The reason is that Beschi’s works taught them to read the nature as mirror of divine presence, embodying Christian belief. Bertoldi’s work Ñānamuyarci and Beschi’s Vetiyar Olukkam gave them the literaty skill with a spiritual vision to live and to proclaim.
It is worth mentioning that Beschi was contemporary of Tayumanavar, but they do not refer to each other. But their vocabulary and metaphors echo the common Saiva worldview they shared. Though the author does not deal with Kitteri Ammāl Ammānai here where the similarity is obvious, the analysis of Tempavani offered by the author bears ample testimony to this — the discussion held by Beschi with Sivāsivan on rebirth and with Vāman who gives up his sexual infatuation. Both are constructed conversations by Beschi.
The book invites the discerning readers to assess the Tamil Christian literature also as a historical document. This work is the result of her studies for over ten years by sittinng with the Tamil scholars in Pondicherry and Madurai to learn the basic grammar and the literature of the Tamil classics before she could plunge into Beschi’s Tempavani. Her philological analysis of this text and her insightful interpretation of the Tempavani testify to her mastery of the language. Trained as a professional historian in several Western institutions and ably guided by her mentors in Chicago University she has brought out the hisorical elements in Beschi’s classical epic, of which not many Tamil scholars are aware.
(Anand Amaladass S. J. focuses at present his research on aesthetic spirituality and option for the least, Jesuit history in India and Tamilology).
